{"id":4702,"date":"2011-03-18T05:08:54","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T03:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ultimatefatburner.com\/?p=4702"},"modified":"2015-02-16T09:01:43","modified_gmt":"2015-02-16T14:01:43","slug":"healthy-skeptic-sensa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/healthy-skeptic-sensa\/","title":{"rendered":"The Healthy Skeptic on Sensa"},"content":{"rendered":"

In case you don’t know what Sensa is, I’ll let Paul explain<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Sensa Tastants\u2014”sprinkles” as they are also referred to on the TrySensa.com web site\u2014are a product you “sprinkle” on your meals to increase satiety (the feeling of “fullness”) and decrease appetite. They work, apparently, by using…<\/p>\n

“…your senses of smell and taste as allies in weight loss. Sprinkling Tastants on your food makes you feel full faster by stimulating the part of your brain that tells your body it\u2019s time to stop eating.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sensa’s\u00a0been on the market for over 2 years now. Both Paul and I had our reservations, but I, for one, was willing to give the inventor, Dr. Alan Hirsch, a partial pass.\u00a0At the time Paul wrote the review, Dr. Hirsch had presented some pretty impressive research results\u00a0at a professional meeting, but his study had yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. But, as I told Paul,\u00a0it\u00a0can take months for a paper\u00a0to be formally reviewed, accepted and published… so the fact that his study hadn’t yet been published wasn’t necessarily damning.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2011… and this “Healthy Skeptic” column on – surprise! – Sensa<\/a>. And guess what? The study still<\/em> hasn’t been published.<\/p>\n

A TV ad for Sensa calls it “a revolutionary weight loss system that will change your life.” Users are assured that they can “eat what [they] like and still lose weight.” How much? One woman in the ad claims to have lost 50 pounds, and another says she lost 45.<\/p>\n

Dr. Alan Hirsch, creator of Sensa and founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation, a Chicago treatment center for people with smell and taste disorders, says that Sensa is clinically proven to work. He conducted a study of 1,436 subjects (mainly women) who used the Sensa program for six months. The study hasn’t been published in a medical journal<\/strong>, but it was presented at a meeting of the Endocrine Society in 2008. In the study, Sensa users reportedly lost an average of 30.5 pounds or almost 15% of their body weight. One hundred people who sprinkled fake Sensa on their foods reportedly lost only 2 pounds on average.<\/p>\n

…But there’s a credibility gap between such research and the results promised by Sensa, says Adam Drewnowski, director of the nutritional sciences program at the University of Washington in Seattle and a renowned expert on taste, appetite and obesity. Because the Sensa study wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal, many questions about the design and the results remain unanswered. Among other things, he says, it’s impossible to know how the subjects were selected, how they were weighed and the range of weights that they lost. “Did some people lose zero pounds?” he asks. “Who knows?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emphasis mine. And yes, I did a followup search for the paper… and came up empty-handed. So I gotta give Paul credit for his intuition:<\/p>\n

“…I can’t say I’m holding my breath to see this published anytime soon. But I’m a skeptical guy by nature and I’ve found that when it comes to the supplement industry I rarely go wrong assuming the worst.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What can I say? The man knows this business.<\/p>\n

At any rate, the “Healthy Skeptic” offers a pretty realistic take on Sensa… which is much the same as the one Paul had: it’s safe, but don’t hold your breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you don’t know what Sensa is, I’ll let Paul explain: Sensa Tastants\u2014”sprinkles” as they are also referred to on the TrySensa.com web site\u2014are a product you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27,28,29],"tags":[1770],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9597,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4702\/revisions\/9597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ultimatefatburner.com\/ufb-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}